Okay, doing something potentially risky, and tweeting as I read the essay more carefully now. (PS I have this song on in the background, not for any reason connecting the song to the review, just because it popped into my mind now.)
1/n
https://twitter.com/prof_dainy/status/1302981933975121922

I read as a Jew who was raised Haredi and is no longer religious. I still grapple with my identity as a Jew and what that means in the contemporary world and in academia.
2/n

I began my graduate career as a medievalist studying Britain, expanded to include Ashkenazic texts, and am now studying Haredi children's literature, 1980-2000.

I say all this because identity matters perhaps more than it should here.
3/n

My first reaction is to the opening: Judah Halevi, as the opening anecdotes and the following few pages make clear, was racist. I grew up knowing about Yehuda Halevi as a holy man. I barely knew he fit into the Middle Ages, because "medieval" was a goyishe thing.
4/n

I knew him as the Rishon, author of the Kuzari. I read an English translation of the Kuzari, I read historical fiction of the Khazars, an entire kingdom who converted to Judaism.
5/n

(Unlike my younger sister, I did not pursue historical academic study in order to learn whether any part of that historical account was true.)
6/n

I know now that much of what I learned as a child and adolescent was racist. (When I began pushing back against the racism of my youth, my mother made an offhand derisive comment about it that still haunts my memories.)
7/n

I didn't know that Halevi originated the idea that chosenness is embedded into Jewish lineage, the idea that made me cringe and shrink away from the Judaism I was raised with when I realized how elitist that is, even while claiming to be the most persecuted people in history.
8/n

Right away, I feel the same need Pearce's Jewish student, to proclaim my distance from this idea - but at the same time, to cry about how it influenced so much of my upbringing and to shout about how it is not all in the past.

And now I sniff back my tears and keep reading.
9/n

This is a deeply personal reading. Just fyi.

In a footnote, @homophonous mentions Suzanne Conklin Akbari's *Idols in the East,* which was formative in my thinking about race and religion in medieval texts.
10/n

When I was still frum, I took a grad class at Fordham (with the amazing Jocelyn Wogan-Browne) and used Akbari's text as the basis for a reading of Boeve de Haumtoune. That book has informed so much of my study and teaching.

Anyway. Footnote. Onward!
11/n

Another footnote mentions Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh's recent essay about the use of the term "Saracen" in medieval English scholarship, which I will definitely look up and bookmark for use in my classes.
12/n

"My own expertise as a scholar means that I was most interested in and qualified to engage
with the issues raised in Heng’s the discussions of Judaism and Islam..."
I think this is an important point: the varying expertise of scholars.
13/n

Perhaps a book like *The Invention of Race* may have been better served as an edited collection or co-written text. Perhaps all of academia, in the goal of intredisciplinary work, needs to embrace the co-authorship model far more than it does now.
14/n

Heng is centered in an English and Comp Lit dept, with joint appointments in Middle Eastern Studies and Women's Studies. She also pioneered a seminar that WAS truly interdisciplinary, drawing on faculty from multiple disciplines to teach the course.
15/n

Clearly, Heng knows the importance of multi-disciplinary approaches and expertise. The Global Middle Aes Project, which she started, also draws on multiple creators and contributors. ( http://www.globalmiddleages.org/ ) So I wonder why that didn't transfer to the book.
16/n

*Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy* (2003) was a crucial book for me when I was working primarily on British romance and Arthurian legend.
17/n

I have not read her later book, *England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West* (2018) which is adapted from *The Invention of Race*. I'm curious to see if Pearce will mention this book in her review. I'll keep an eye out.
18/n

"the idea that medieval England is archetypal is not widely accepted in Jewish historiography" reading the preface to this, where Pearce quotes from Heng citing Stacey that medieval England can be used as a source for all of Europe had me shouting "no" at the screen.
19/n

England is not at all comparable to France & Germany (Ashkenaz), nor to Spain & Portugal, nor to Italy, all of which are not comparable with each other. The lived realities of Jewish life in all these regions varied widely, as did the attitudes of the dominant religions.
20/n

"Stacey is not, in the end, arguing that the Jewish community of medieval England is an archetypal European one, but rather that the dynamic relationship between Jews and Christians in that time and place ...
21/n

...paved the way for specific and determined internal and external changes in that community relative to its European counterparts."
YES! THIS!
22/n

"an epistemological problem common in English literary study and in the field of Medieval Studies more broadly: namely treating England as European civilization’s ground zero... scholars of England peering out at the rest of the world" (157)
23/n

I know I've been guilty of the above, but maybe I was predisposed not to fall into that trap too much ever since my undergrad thesis, when I compared versions of Arthurian tales in French and Welsh. I've always been interested in similarity *with a difference.*
24/n

Maybe also because of the way the Medieval Studies Certificate Program is set up at CUNY, where we have to take an interdisciplinary intro course - which was taught by a French professor my year - that I never thought of England as the center of anything for too long.
25/n

"its effect is to contextualize the history of Jewish conversion to Christianity within a Christian messianic and eschatological telos" (159)
This is a habit that always made me so mad (tears-in-my-eyes mad) when I came across it.
26/n

I didn't recognize it in Heng's book, probably because I was reading very quickly and also because (surprise) I'm not that familiar with NT or Christian phrases!
27/n

"By naming the site in Jewish terms, Fulcher is in fact
placing a supersessionist and Christian claim upon it." (160)
That's a great point, about naming the location "Temple of Solomon" despite being occupied by Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque complex for centuries.
28/n

"one of [the book's] great strengths is in identifying many such examples. Yet they are repeatedly dropped as quickly as they are mentioned" (162)
This makes me wonder about the timeline of writing and publication of the book:
29/n

Was Heng somehow rushed to press? (Was this part of her tenure? I assume not, since she has an earlier book over ten years before this one.) What happened afterwards that prompted the follow-up book focusing on Jews of England? Are acadamia's limitations at play here?
30/n

Ie, is this part of the institutional pressure to publish? Would Heng have liked to have done things differently? Spent more time on it? Now I'm really curious...
31/n

Ah, Pearce addresses that in the very next sentence on the next page lol: "Heng writes in the introduction about struggling with the length of the final product" (163).
32/n

But then, would this perhaps have been better served as a series of books, each one devoted to an angle of the topic after an initial introductory book? Which seems to be what Heng is doing with *England and the Jews* maybe?
33/n

"the idea of conversion first as a matter of interior belief only rather than adherence to community norms, orthopraxy & participation in a particular legal system" (163)
Okay I have way too much to say about this, so: for a modern example, read @AyalaFader *Hidden Heretics*
34/n

[Side note: I recently found a book I had read as a teen, historical fiction about the English expulsion of Jews. I will probably read that when I'm done with this review essay.]
35/n

[A Distant Dream, by Levi Kaufman. Probably not great literature, but for a frum kids' book, I don't expect it to be.]